lust entertainment
Women and AIDS
to tell my story and in my own small way help
tear down the wall o f taboos regarding AIDS.
Editors Rieder and Ruppelt shed light on AIDS-affected
women who must battle not only the disease but the racism,
sexism, homophobia and poverty that keep them invisible
user, health educator, hotline worker, policy
maker. They are all here, speaking in honest,
AIDS: The Women. Edited by Ines Rieder
unflinching voices about the pain, love, and
and Patricia Ruppelt. Cleis Press. 1988. 251
insight AIDS has brought to their lives.
pages. $9.95.
There is Dyana Basist. who speaks the
despair others have felt when she writes about a
friend who has died of AIDS: “ All sounds are
uch of what is written about AIDS has the
sudden/everything is happening for the first
quality of a snapshot taken on the run. a
picture barely able to keep up with constantly time/nothing is enough.” And there is Elisabeth,
shifting information, changing faces, mounting
a 29-year-old Berliner who writes that, through
her HIV infection. “ I have come to a deeper
and fuller understanding of life, and I will
continue on this track.”
The editors, both former editors of Con­
nexions. the international women’s quarterly,
numbers. AIDS: The Women, a new antho­
have stretched to include disparate voices in this
logy published by Cleis Press, has the opposite
book. There are women from the United States,
effect. It slowly pans through the personal
Western Europe. Zimbabwe, the Philippines;
stories of 41 women affected in some way by
there are women who speak with anger, frustra­
AIDS, bringing each one into close focus, yet
tion. hope, wistfulness, alienation, trust. There
leaving the reader with a broad sense of how
are residents of welfare hotels and there are
AIDS is changing the lives of women
university researchers. There are no easy stereo­
everywhere.
types in this book, and no simple answers.
To read this book straight through is to induce
The bulk of AIDS research and writing has
the exhaustion faced by anyone dealing directly
focused on men. In publishing this book, editors
with AIDS. Just when you think you cannot
Rieder and Ruppelt shed light on AIDS-affected
absorb any more information, handle any more
women who must battle not only the disease but
emotion, you turn the page.. . and there she is,
the racism, sexism, homphobia. and poverty
the woman who is seropositive, the mother or
that keep them invisible.
sister or lover of someone who is dying, the
There is Jennifer Brown, who writes of her
doctor or social worker, prostitute. IV drug
terror and fury at the hospital workers who led
B V
A N N D E E
H O C H M A N
M
Stephanie Torres, Faith McDevitt, Kathay Duff, Mary Miles. Chense Millhouse
international Lecturer and
Best Setiing author of:
I Lon My Body
AIDS: A Positive Approach
You Can Heal Your Ufa
la nXvm copes la prsit tunpatm m leu tanguam
Recently featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show
and the Phil Donahue Show.
Presented by.
The Civic Auditorium
SW 3rd Avenue and Market Street. Portland. Oregon
May 18 th
7-.30
pm
A il Seats Reserved:
$ 14 . 50 , $ 12 . 50 . $ 9.50
Tickets aveiiabie at:
Civic Auditorium box office
Living Enrichment Center
and Stiles for Relaxation,
tor information, call (503) 292-2050
LIVING ENRICHMENT CENTER
9372 SW Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy, Beaverton. OR 97005
jusI iful ▼
20 ▼ April 1
Ho w do you tell the people whom you are
closest to that you have AIDS? How do you
tell your mother o f ninety-two that her one
and only child is ill with the most feared
illness of our time? Your daughter at the other
end o f the country? Your son and his family?
. . . No. gentlemen. I will not live anony­
mously. On the contrary. I feel an obligation
PHOTO BY SALLIE
Louise Hay
Louise explains how our beliefs and ideas about
oursehtes and others impact our physical and emo
honat health The evening w ill include Louise s presen
tahon and lure music
her lover. Joan, immobilizing doses of Com­
pazine. There is JH. living in a $400 per month
hotel room with her eight-year-old daughter,
struggling to pay expenses with AFDC income
of $460 per month. There is Lynn Hampton, an
outreach worker in Atlanta, who tries to talk
long-term AIDS prevention to a cocaine-
addicted prostitute who responds that she'll be
lucky to be alive next week, the hell with five
years from now. There is Kate Scannell, who
learns that her physician's bag of tricks isn't
enough for some AIDS patients.
And there is Use Groth, a Danish woman
whose eloquent essay must speak for others:
The essays, composed from interviews or the
contributors' own written words, are not heroic,
but they inspire awe: they are not sentimental,
but they provoke tears. They raise a spectrum of
sticky issues about AIDS — of confidentiality
and privacy, inadequate medical care, attitudes
about sexuality and death, homophobia and
classism — but they are not abstract or
academic. Instead, these dilemmas come forth
in the voices of real women talking about their
very real lives.
The editors allow their contributors to speak
for themselves, adding only a brief overview of
AIDS statistics and short introductions before
each section. Each essay, then, touches the
reader directly. And that contact is crucial, be­
cause it challenges one of the most insidious
effects of AIDS. For many people, AIDS has
become a reason to retreat into private worlds,
shore up an illusion o f personal safety, to
increase our isolation and further our prejudice,
to build walls between ourselves and those who
are “ different.”
This book refuses to allow those fences. In it,
the experience of the drug-addicted prostitute
has as much to teach as the work of the govern­
ment researcher. We may not know these
women, or anyone like them, but surely we can
identify with their grief, their struggle, their
hope, and match it to our own. We are not so
different — all human, after all. And in com­
municating that simple message, AIDS: The
Women, accomplishes something important.
Because the way we must grapple with AIDS,
or with any global, complex issues, demands
first that we see clearly how it affects the human
being in each of us.
*
PWTC presents
evening of one-acts
Kathay says the company is excited to be
producing Tennessee Williams' work along­
side the works of contemporary women
playwrights.
This theatrical sampler evening will range
ortland Women’sTheat. eC'ompany's new
from the Broadway dressing room of Claudia
production has the title Just Between Us,
Allen's Movie Queens to Williams' dilapidated
but this is not just one play — it's five one-acts road house in Condemned. Beauty Standards
with the common theme of relationships. This
(unfortunately) has not become outdated since it
format is a departure from PWTC's usual fare,
was last produced in Portland a few years ago. It
and will provide an opportunity for us to see the
is a humorous look at the standards of youth and
range and scope of the company’s actors.
beauty that society has created and that we as
The plays are: After All We’ve Been
women both embrace and are victimized by.
Through, by Leslea Newman; Beauty
Walt War Wrong is D uff s recreation of the
Standards by Sandra de Helen and Kate
Sleeping Beauty tale.
Kasten; Movie Queens by Claudia Allen; This
Just Between Us promises to be a lively and
Property Is Condemned by Tennessee
fun ». » uiiiik *>ut. Die plays open April 14 and
Williams; and Walt Was Wrong by PWTC's
run through May 21 (see Calendar for details).
Artistic Director. Kathay Duff.
— Sandra de Helen
P